I’ll find you I promise I’ll keep trying don’t worry don’t worry

stay in the same place if you’re lost my mom told me when I was

little when I got lost in the park the grocery store the mall just

stay in the same place so I can find you

The letter, scrawled in blue pen on the back of a credit card application, had been addressed to her and opened. Five days after her mother died, Meg found a stack of letters from Daniel rubber-banded, wrapped in a pillowcase, tucked into the back of her mother’s high closet shelf.

Meg backed down the wobbly, metal stepladder, clutching the musty, pink-flowered pillowcase to her chest. She sat cross-legged on the dusty wood floor where the doorframe dug into her back. She welcomed the discomfort; the sharp edges would leave deep, red creases in her skin.

She set Daniel’s letter to the side and opened the next. He’d written this one on an envelope and placed it inside another envelope.

They arrested me at the school said I wasn’t allowed to be there

that I was scaring the girls eating lunch on the bleachers I told the

cop hey man don’t worry I’m not here for them I’m here for Meg

I told him you were there and could he go inside and ask he said

son if she was your girlfriend in high school she’s not here anymore

he ducked my head into his car even though I told him I saw you

that you were waiting for me then he started agreeing with everything

I said so I knew he wouldn’t help and I’ll come back try again

after I’m released

Four years ago, Daniel had kept returning to their high school to look for her. He’d approach the girls sitting outside. Maybe their hair was long and straight, the way hers had been. Daniel, by then twenty-two, must have looked old to them. He’d pull his sunglasses from his face and at least one of the girls would have noticed his eyes. Despite his sweet, dimpled smile, the girl with long, straight hair on the high school bleachers would have felt uneasy, because the change in Daniel’s eyes were the first thing she’d noticed when this began.

At seventeen, they’d spent every possible moment together. Meg’s positive pregnancy test, taken in his parents’ basement bathroom, somehow shocked them. Sitting on an old quilt on the town golf course, they talked well past her curfew.

“It’ll be okay,” he’d assured her. She’d cried into his chest until his T-shirt grew damp and wrinkled. His hands dug into her hair. “Please don’t cry,” he’d pleaded. “Please don’t cry. Please just don’t.”

Their hands clasped tight, Meg and Daniel had waited in the silent clinic until her name was called. She followed the staff counselor, listened to her detailed description, and gave consent. Meg squeezed her eyes closed and endured the procedure alone. She nodded through the counselor’s guidance about how much bleeding to expect and about the need for a follow-up appointment.

Clutching the birth control pamphlet, Meg stopped in the doorway of the waiting room. Daniel’s eyes were red and distant. He gestured with his hands, focused on something that wasn’t there. He’d jumped when she called his name, then smiled a sad smile, stood, and wrapped his arm around her.

            “Lean all your weight on me,” he’d said. “I won’t let you go.”

Meg unfolded a much older letter but stopped when she recognized it. She refolded it, kept folding, pressed it into a tight square. Long ago, she’d read and hidden this letter, taping it underneath her bedside table drawer. She’d hidden Daniel’s apology for killing her dog, burning his body, burying what was left in the woods behind his parents’ home. She’d hidden this letter from her mother, because if she had seen it, Meg would never have been allowed near Daniel again.

She’d found him crying in her driveway. He handed her Boots’s collar. He tried to explain that he knew—he knew for certain—that Boots would hurt her, would sink his teeth into her face.

Meg ran from him.

“I’d never hurt you!” he yelled, pounding the locked door between them.

Meg held her dog’s collar in both hands. How could he do this? How did this happen? Who can help him?

Weeks later, he carved her name, deep and wide, into his forearm. He left the knife on her mother’s front porch. The police officer and her mother convinced Meg that Daniel would hurt her next. They’d persuaded her to agree to the restraining order.

Her transfer to a college in a faraway state must have felt like she’d abandoned him. Meg had known—known for certain—that whatever happened next would come from this severance.

She opened another.

WHEREAREYOUWHEREAREYOUWHEREARYOUWHEREAREYOU

There were several letters like this, letters that bore into her, that confirmed her guilt.

Meg pressed the last of the opened letters to her face. She inhaled, trying to recapture the memory of the way Daniel smelled: Ivory soap, a little sweat, mowed grass from his afternoons on the baseball field. She could name these things but couldn’t conjure them. The return address was from the psychiatric hospital. Daniel had written to her on a sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper.

I’m sorry I scared you. Your name is cut into my arm so I know that

is true. They said I killed Boots but I can’t believe I would do that.

My mom visits me and she’s an old woman I barely recognize.

She doesn’t smile or cry.

Meg stood; her back and shoulders ached. She paced around boxes she’d filled with her mother’s things. The last of Daniel’s letters had remained sealed; her mother must have stopped reading. Daniel continued to send them to the last place he knew where to find her. Meg plodded to her mother’s bathroom, blew her nose, washed her face, and wiped her eyes on a threadbare lavender towel. She stared at her image in the mirror; she was twenty-six, how could she look so old?

She returned to her seat on the floor, her back against one side of her mother’s closet door frame, and braced her feet on the other. She opened Daniel’s next letter.

I take so many meds now. I just sleep. I miss you more because I don’t

see you. You’re not walking down the too bright hall. You’re not in the

cafeteria or the TV room. You’re not sitting on a bench outside,

looking up at me, wishing you could come in.

She’d heard from friends that he’d been hospitalized. She hunted him down and tried to see him. The woman at the front desk said, “One moment, please,” made a phone call, waited on hold for long minutes. She avoided Meg’s stare.

A weary, washed-out man older than Meg’s mother appeared and touched her elbow.

“I’m so sorry. Due to the sensitive nature of the care we provide, we simply cannot risk our client’s privacy by acknowledging—”

Meg asked, “But can you tell him I’m here?”

His eyes softened. “In certain circumstances...” He paused and looked around. “It’s often best to keep your distance. One might consider it safer.”

Meg bit her lip to keep from telling this man wielding the power that held Daniel away from her that it wasn’t best for Daniel to believe she’d abandoned him. Wasn’t he taking his medication? Wasn’t he safe for her now? Instead, she asked, “Will he get better?”

 He’d answered, “With all clients, we hope, but don’t know.”

The next letter had no return address. She ran her fingers over where Daniel had pressed the pen so hard writing her name she couldn’t believe he hadn’t ripped it apart.

Released off meds I’m looking for you but it’s too crowded in the

mall before Christmas and I can’t live with my mom anymore the

house was empty and locked so I climbed in my bedroom window

it got so cold I had to make a fire then the smoke hurt my eyes so

I had to leave I walk all day now looking why can’t

I find you anywhere

Meg’s mother had told her that after Daniel had set fire to and completely destroyed their home, his parents moved to Florida. Meg graduated from college that spring and took a job in Pittsburgh.

She opened his last letter, sent from prison.

I heard you got married and divorced. Did you leave him

because of me? I left everyone because of you.

Before leaving her, Meg’s ex-husband had shouted, “You still love the Daniel who doesn’t exist!” Their marriage disintegrated six months after it began. Her mother was devastated.

Alone, she’d searched for any record of Daniel online. The famous football player with his same name filled her screen. She couldn’t find her not-famous Daniel; she couldn’t find him anywhere.

A small, sealed envelope held Daniel’s obituary, dated almost two years ago. Meg’s mother had clipped it from the local paper and taped it to an index card. Meg still remembered, word for word, the four short lines listing his family’s names, his date of birth, and death— “after battling a long illness.”

Jimmy McNichol, a high school friend who’d become a police officer, had called Meg’s mother the night Daniel died. He’d left his number for Meg, said he hoped he could share details to provide her some closure.

Meg remembered hoping he could, the way she’d hoped she wasn’t pregnant at seventeen, like she’d hoped Daniel would become whole again and that one day they could have a life together.

She called Jimmy back and he’d said, “We found him under the Market Street Bridge. We picked him up all the time. He’d been stabbed. Mental illness plus drugs equals violence, Meg.” Jimmy, now Officer McNichol, filled the silence with, “You should know that he had an old scar—your name—cut into his arm. He had some fresh, infected wounds on his other arm that said, ‘FIND ME.’”

Meg asked Jimmy the only thing she cared about: “The way he died, do you think he suffered?”

She hadn’t listened to his reply. Daniel’s disease spent nine years killing him. His suffering had come to an end. Meg’s belly felt cold and hollow. Regret and relief sat side by side, their coexistence unbearable.

Jimmy McNichol had said, “You’re safe now. He’s gone.”

Meg wrapped Daniel’s letters in the faded pillowcase. She rose to standing with an unfamiliar lightness. She could no longer feel her Daniel anywhere, only in his letters that found her found her in her mother’s closet. She was safe now. He’d written them long after he was gone.

THE END